Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Technical & Gameplay Problems BG3 Crashing on High-End PC – Worked Fine on Old Machine

I know a similar topic already exists, but it's 2 years old and I'm not sure about necroposting rules. So I'm creating this one, and if moderators prefer, I can post in the old thread instead.

Here's the problem:

I have two PCs. One is for internet browsing — it's a total mess, super laggy, full of viruses, and the hardware is really old. But it happened that the first time I played BG3, it was on that trash PC — and I played for 170 hours without a single crash. Not one!

Now I'm playing BG3 again on my gaming PC, which I only use for AAA games like Witcher, Cyberpunk, Skyrim, etc. The system is very clean — used exclusively for gaming, and I reinstall Windows every 6 months with fresh drivers. Never had any problems running any AAA games on high or ultra settings. Hardware is solid and barely used. But with BG3, every 1–2 hours the game restarts the entire computer (huge thanks to the person who implemented the 50 quicksaves feature)

The only real differences between the two setups are:

- Trash PC: online + Full HD
- Gaming PC: offline + 4K

Everything else people usually mention — like bad PSU, outdated drivers, or corrupted files — is baseless speculation. The issue clearly comes down to only two factors: offline mode or 4K resolution, nothing else.


Any ideas? Anyone had a similar experience?

After lots of testing, I figured out the problem: it's the screen resolution.

The crashes that restart the computer aren't because the GPU or CPU is too hot, or because of mods, or bad/faulty hardware. I even ran the game on a GTX 650 for a whole day with no crashes (it was super slow, but stable) — and it doesn't matter if the computer is online or offline.

The problem is this — the higher the resolution, the more unstable the game becomes over time:

1080p - No restarts, super stable even after 100+ hours.

1440p - Some restarts start happening after 20+ hours, mostly during cutscenes. For example, the Shadowheart romance scene when the tieflings visit camp always crashes.

4K - After ~12 hours of play it's a constant downpour of crashes. Almost every cutscene, quicksave, location change, inventory access causes full system restart

Solution: don't buy 4K or 8K screens for gaming — it-s nothing but trouble and a waste of money on hardware. Lower the resolution to FullHD (and enjoy the blurry, soapy image)

I'm not a tech expert, but I do know that individual games can at most only cause game crashes. If you do have full system restarts playing on a different resolution there is something far bigger going own outside of a specific game. You already mentioned it not being GPU or CPU temperature or bad/faulty hardware, those would be my first thoughts too, but from what I know a game can never have such a big impact on your system to cause full system restarts on its own. Even when you give admin permission to a game, as far as I know it should be impossible that a game has anywhere near the access to your system that is required to reach the point where it can crash more than just itself.

Don't really have an idea what it could be beyond that. The only thing I do remember with full system restarts gaming with a high-end laptop I had was that I checked all regular stuff like drivers, CPU and GPU temperatures and all that seemed fine. Then looking through other diagnostic programs I found one that also accessed motherboard temperatures. It was the motherboard temperature that my system didn't register and once that reached ~95 Celsius, my system would crash to protect itself from getting hotter. I don't really know much of the technical side of things, but basically in my case the motherboard was placed in a spot where the ventilators didn't cool it as well as they did for the CPU and GPU, and where the fans did register CPU and GPU temperatures and reacted appropriately, they did not register motherboard temperature and let that component slowly cook itself to a full system restart.

I had a similar thing a few years ago. The system, a desktop PC, would increasingly get too hot on a part of the motherboard that for some reason didn't register on the included monitoring tools. Only when a friend checked with an extended diagnosis kit, we found out and opened the computer. After applying some thermal paste to the CPU and removing the felt sock the main fan had crocheted from dust and dead bugs, the system was running smoothly again.

I learned a half a dozen computers ago it's good to blow it out with a leaf blower from time to time. It's not just build up on cooling fins and fans. That stuff can work its way into connectors and break the electrical connection.

Car wire harnesses have this problem and there's a buttload of engineering devoted to protecting the harness connections from a decade of vibration and dust working its way in.